Wonder Woman. Issue 6. Comic Book Review!

PREVIOUSLY: Wonder Woman has returned home to London… but leaving Paradise Island doesn’t mean leaving the gods behind, as two of the most powerful deities of the pantheon have come to town – and neither of them is leaving without being crowned King of the gods!

I can’t start this review off with anything other than a sigh.

When DC announced the reboot, I was hoping they’d finally manage to do something right with Wonder Woman. That’s not to say writers such as Simone/Rucka didn’t write good stories, but the character really isn’t meeting her full potential if she’s far behind Superman and Batman in terms of sales and critical adoration. She’s iconic on the surface, and yet has never really lived up to her third part of the ‘Trinity’ status.

So I gave WW #1 a chance. And I didn’t like it. At all.

It was, for me, one of the lesser reboots in that it made no real attempt to merge myriad elements of the character into a cohesive whole. And to me, a successful reboot (ala Johns Aquaman) has to bring together the best bits of the character and the history into a cohesive whole.

Wonder Woman #1 didn’t. At all. And Wonder Woman #6 doesn’t either.

I stopped reading after Issue One, but decided to catch every sixth issue because… well, I want to like Wonder Woman’s comic. I think the character has tremendous potential and I’ll never write her off. Especially as Brian Azzarello did such a good job with Flashpoint: Batman.

Of course, I think that’s the problem.

He’s not suited to what a Wonder Woman comic should be, writing it as if it’s a part of The Ultimate universe, where the core heroes (save Spider-Man) are stunningly unlikeable and commit acts of violence without caring who they hit. So instead of using Wonder Woman as a woman torn between being a soldier and a diplomat, Azzarelo has her being a one woman tank who hangs out with an oddly reworked bunch of Greek deities.

I don’t even think that the ideas are bad, so much as used on the wrong character.

The artwork certainly isn’t bad. I’m not sure it’s the best out there, given how brilliant Daredevil’s is, but it’s relatively crisp. And the writing wouldn’t be bad either, if you distanced it from the fact that it’s not really any version of Wonder Woman seen before.

No, the problem is that it ticks the boxes of a completely original character.

That character just isn’t Wonder Woman. It’s not even the Wonder Woman we’ve seen in Justice League Dark (in the present) or Justice League (in the past.) You get the sense Azzarello is just writing the character the way he wants, and everyone else is doing likewise. There’s no connection there, which is disappointing as the Johns Wonder Woman is actually an interesting twist on the character.